A rush to bad judgment, Part III

This Washington Times editorial defends the courageous Rep. Duncan Hunter for resisting the rush to enact the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. The Times explains:

The truth is that the very idea of shifting control of defense intelligence agencies away from the Pentagon (as embodied in the Senate bill) is a proposal to “fix” a nonexistent problem: When Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, chairman and vice chairman of the September 11 commission, testified on Capitol Hill, both acknowledged in response to a question from Mr. Hunter their panel had come across no specific instance of a failure or negligence on the part of a Department of Defense agency.

Along the same lines, defense analyst Jack Kelly (in a Washington Times column that does not appear on-line) points out that the pending intelligence reform bill does “nothing to remedy any of the defects in the FBI and the CIA that led to the surprise attack, save for information-sharing, which would be improved by establishing a counter-terrorism center for the intelligence community.” In short, as Kelly puts it, “the intelligence reform bill won’t fix what’s broken, but it might break what’s fixed,” namely the agencies within the Defense Department whose primary mission is the gathering of military intelligence.